The NSW Police Brutality Fund

As part of his relentless commitment to fucking up everything he touches, last week Chris Minns floated the idea of giving NSW Police the power to ban the weekly pro-Palestine protests in the Sydney CBD if they cost the state too much money.

Speaking to 2GB, the official state apparatus where NSW premiers go to ritually humiliate themselves, Minns claimed the rallies have cost over $5.4 million since October 2023 and that this constituted “a huge drain on the public purse”.

Like his short-lived pledge that the rally on October 6 was “not going to happen,” Minns immediately had to walk the idea back after members of his own Labor caucus and several trade unions called it anti-democratic and unworkable. Somehow, Minns even pissed off the head of the police union, who took exception to Minns’ wildly untrue claim that the protests meant “police potentially weren’t responding to other types of crime”.

The NSW Liberal Party has since proposed making the protests “user-pays” — meaning that protest organisers, rather than the state government, would pay for the enormous police presence these protests apparently require.

$5.4 million for cops to provide “security” at 52 large protests in the Sydney CBD over the course of a year means that the protests have cost the state about $103,000 a week — chump change for a state economy worth over $777 billion in 2022-23, but which would effectively ban the protests if organisers had to foot the bill.

If Minns is looking for ways to cut the state’s policing bill, I’ve found a way to make it rain savings: getting the same cops who police those protests to stop constantly bashing people.

Last October, just as the protests were kicking off, NSW Greens MP Sue Higginson asked the state government how many civil claims were made against NSW Police for things like assault, wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, unlawful searches and harassment between July 2018 and June 2023, and how much money was paid out.

A month later the stats came back:

Over those five years, the state government paid out $161,942,963 in civil claims against NSW Police. A massive 1,962 claims were filed against police — more than one a day — of which 1,522 were settled one way or another in the same financial year.

That means NSW taxpayers paid an average of more than $620,000 a week for five years to settle cases of police brutality, harassment and humiliation, which were continually brought before the courts at a rate of more than one per day.

(This didn’t get reported anywhere at the time — the only outlet that eventually picked it up was the Daily Telegraph, of all places, five months later. Instead of quoting Higginson or someone who might have something worthwhile to say, the Tele got Rod Roberts, a One Nation-turned-independent state MP who was a cop for 20 years, to talk about how “police officers aren’t intentionally going out of their way to harm members of the public or break the law”. Righto.)

A prominent recent example of such a case is that of Daniel Keneally, a NSW Police officer and former Premier Kristina Keneally’s son. Keneally was found guilty in February of fabricating evidence that led to activist Luke Brett Moore being wrongly imprisoned for three weeks. For falsely accusing Moore of threatening to kill a police officer, Keneally was fined $2,000 and sentenced to 200 hours of community service. Moore is now suing the state government, which has already conceded that Moore was maliciously prosecuted.

(Having successfully sued the police several times already, Moore now runs a service, ISuePolice, which helps people who have been illegally strip-searched seek compensation.)

It’s very difficult to find more information about most cases like this because almost all of them are subject to confidentiality clauses that bar victims of police brutality from speaking about what happened to them. Barely any civil claims against the police go to trial — victims usually settle because most can’t afford the risk of losing in open court. To keep the details of each settlement under wraps, the state government pays far more than it would likely lose in open court.

Even very high-profile cases often end in a confidential settlement. The family of Clare Nowland — the 95-year-old, 43-kilogram woman who police tased to death in her nursing home last year — took a confidential settlement in March.

I have done some high-level calculations and made a shocking finding: $620,000 a week is a lot more money than $103,000 a week, especially when the $103,000 is spent on protests against an ongoing genocide and the $620,000 is essentially a state subsidy for cops to bash people.

All this presents Chris Minns with an almighty cost-cutting opportunity. Instead of the state budget operating as an essentially limitless NSW Police Brutality Fund, every time a cop bashes or frames or strip-searches someone, take the settlement payment out of the NSW Police operating budget — or the offending officer’s salary — and watch how quickly that $620,000-a-week payout shrinks.

(If you are someone in the NSW government bureaucracy who pays top-dollar for budget-friendly insights like these I am available for hire as a consultant. My hourly fee is criminally high but still less than the goblins at KPMG.)

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